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Summary
Summary
Discover the fascinating behind-the-scenes stories and lasting impact of the trailblazing sketch comedy show that upended television, launched the careers of some of our biggest stars, and changed the way we talk, think, and laugh about race: In Living Color .
Few television shows revolutionized comedy as profoundly or have had such an enormous and continued impact on our culture as In Living Color . Inspired by Richard Pryor, Carol Burnett, and Eddie Murphy, Keenen Ivory Wayans created a television series unlike any that had come before it. Along the way, he introduced the world to Jamie Foxx, Jim Carrey, David Alan Grier, Rosie Perez, and Jennifer Lopez, not to mention his own brothers Damon, Marlon, and Shawn Wayans. In Living Color shaped American culture in ways both seen and unseen, and was part of a sea change that moved black comedy and hip-hop culture from the shadows into the spotlight.
Now, Homey Don't Play That reveals the complete, captivating story of how In Living Color overcame enormous odds to become a major, zeitgeist-seizing hit. Through exclusive interviews with the cast, writers, producers, and network executives, this insightful and entertaining chronicle follows the show's ups and downs, friendships and feuds, tragedies and triumphs, sketches and scandals, the famous and the infamous, unveiling a vital piece of history in the evolution of comedy, television, and black culture.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
A history of the development of the hit TV show In Living Color and the comedy dynasty of the Wayans family.Freelance culture and entertainment writer Peisner (co-author, with Steven "Steve-O" Glover: Professional Idiot, 2011) argues convincingly for In Living Color's cultural importance at the dawn of the 1990s, as it brought an underground tradition of confrontational yet reflective African-American comedy into the mainstream. Although he quotes many of the show's principals, he focuses on Keenen Ivory Wayans (and his siblings), starting with their hardscrabble 1960s New York childhood. Following a youthful fascination with Richard Pryor, Keenen determined to pursue a comedy career. He found some early success, including a Tonight Show appearance, though, as the author notes, "it's almost impossible to overstate what a wasteland Hollywood was for African-Americans in the early eighties," with the exception of Eddie Murphy. Still, Wayans was part of a formative generation of comics and directors, including Robert Townsend, Spike Lee, Arsenio Hall, and Chris Rock, all of whom crossed paths with him or were involved with ILC (or skewered by its sketches). After years of such scuffling, Wayans found opportunity via the unlikely venue of Fox, "still a new network [that] felt distinctly minor-league." While Wayans recalls "getting a blank check from Fox, total freedom' as he put it," Peisner notes that stories regarding the show's origins are contradictory. Still, the show won an Emmy Awards in its first season and became a phenomenon. The author ably captures these glory days and later seasons, when a mixture of grueling production norms, competition and conflicts among cast and writers, and network difficulties caused a clear decline, culminating in Keenen's departure during the fourth season (and the show's cancellation following the fifth). Since then, "the Wayans brothers have become essentially a parody factory." Peisner's telling is casual and sometimes repetitive, but he effectively pulls together the recollections of many involved with this influential enterprise.A breezy, slightly overlong account that will interest fans of African-American culture and TV comedy due to its up-close detail and numerous sources. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
THE DIRECTOR DAVID LYNCH, of "Blue Velvet" and "Twin Peaks" fame, is mournful over the probable demise of theatrical cinema. "Home systems could get really good," he suggests wistfully in his new book, room to DREAM (Random House, $32). "The other thing that could happen is, movies will be streamed directly to your phone, and that wouldn't be so good." Well, I'm here to tell Lynch that my children are already there; as they peer down into their luminous rectangles like Narcissus hovering over his reflecting pool, the tiny screen is eclipsing the big and small screens alike - the world revealed on a surface resembling a 3-by-5 index card. Not that Lynch need unduly worry about his talents becoming obsolete. As "Room to Dream," written with the Los Angeles-based critic and journalist Kristine McKenna, makes clear, his artistic Midas touch lately extends from film and television to painting and music; like Patti Smith (and possibly nobody else), Lynch apparently gets up in the morning and makes art in one medium and another right up until bedtime. "Room to Dream" is, as the introduction observes, "basically a person having a conversation with his own biography." McKenna turns in an impressively industrious and comprehensive account of Lynch's career, larded with insightful quotes from dozens of people whose lives have intersected with his - after each chapter of which Lynch offers, at similar length, his own impressionistic and free-associative commentary. The portrait that emerges is that of a protean talent who has pungently projected the nightmares of his unconscious into his creative work but who is impressively at peace with his personal demons. While Lynch's signature artistic mode is hectic, psychotic mayhem punctuated with bewitchingly off-angle perspectives on the American ethos and mythos, those who have worked with him unanimously praise the generosity of spirit and Zen composure that reign over his sets and shoots. The book only lightly covers this aspect of Lynch, touching briefly on his deep commitment to Transcendental Meditation - he offers only that "when I started meditating the anger went away." Instead we sense a certain emotional coldness; in the wake of several marriages, with children, Lynch observes that "relationships are like films, and people come and they go." His onetime paramour Isabella Rossellini volunteers that, with scarce prior indication, Lynch "left me with a phone call telling me he never wanted to see me again" - a diktat that crushed her, she says. Still, " Room to Dream" is an absorbing glimpse into a compulsively creative soul whose credo might as well be, as he writes at one point: "I love the logic of dreams. Anything can happen and it makes sense." HOMEY DON'T PLAY THAT! The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution (37 INK/Atria, $28), by David Peisner, places another flinty character front and center. It's a capacious account of the seminal Fox variety show "In Living Color" and its place in the larger context of modern African-American culture. The show's mastermind, Keenan Ivory Wayans, had kicked around the Los Angeles comedy scene for a decade and collaborated on a couple of films ("Hollywood Shuffle," "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka") when Fox, the then-fledgling and decidedly flimsy "fourth network," persuaded him to come back to his native New York City and launch "In Living Color" in 1990. It was instant landmark TV, winning an Emmy Award just five months in, and it launched the careers of everyone from Jamie Foxx and Jim Carrey to Jennifer Lopez (who, as a "fly girl," got a couple of minutes per episode to make an impression as a hip-hop go-go dancer choreographed by Rosie Perez, among others). Wayans is a canny cultural button-pusher who drove his stable of writers to the edge and over, routinely keeping them after midnight and expecting them back first thing in the morning. The comedian Ali Wentworth, who came to the show toward the end of its five-year run, tells Peisner: "I had a pit in my stomach every single day.... It was a really cold, destructive place to work." Steve Oudekerk, who had known Wayans in Los Angeles, says that his reaction when he came on to write for the show was: "My gosh, you've become Colonel Kurtz. What happened?" On the other hand, when the writer Robert Schimmel's son was dying of cancer, Wayans sent him home and told him to come back when he was ready and able. According to Schimmel's brother and co-writer, Jeff, Wayans told the stricken father, who was worried about his livelihood and benefits, "You're not fired, you're not quitting, everything is here for you." "In Living Color" compulsively punctured the envelope of acceptable taste, trashing shibboleths of political correctness and race consciousness in every dimension. It's impossible to forget, even a quarter-century later, Foxx's drag routine as Wanda, the woman with an unrealistic opinion of her pulchritude. The flamboyantly gay pair portrayed by Damon Wayans and David Allen Grier in their "Men on... " skits was almost beyond the pale - but, Peisner reports, "the sketches were so popular that they were played in loops in gay bars around Los Angeles." At Howard University, Keenan's younger brother Marlon heard a professor deride his brother's TV triumph as a "minstrel show" - thereby linking it accurately, if unreflectively, to one of the most fascinating traditions in American entertainment. In truth, much of what made "In Living Color" must-see TV probably couldn't be broadcast in today's woke and mindful era - but that's what made it so memorable. Peisner's narrative fully honors the show's uniqueness, and meticulously lays out how it came undone. By the beginning of the fourth season, Wayans was constantly butting heads with Fox suits who were obsessed with toning the show down. At one fraught moment, when executives wanted a line changed in an episode, they came looking for the master tape, and at Wayans's behest the producer hid it in a drop ceiling. Wayans soon left the show altogether, and it collapsed after one more halfhearted season. Let us take a moment to marvel at the irony that shows like Wayans's helped keep Fox's fragile network franchise alive until it could take flight in the Newt Gingrich era as the vehicle for what's now known, in shorthand, as Trump TV. An even more improbable tale is on offer in Matthew Polly's BRUCE LEE: A Life (Simon & Schuster, $35), apparently the first noteworthy treatment of its subject - and a definitive one at that. Polly, a onetime Rhodes scholar and a martial arts maven who spent two years studying hand-tohand fighting at the legendary Shaolin Temple in China, frames Lee's story as the tale of a global soul who often seemed like a visitor from the future. Born in San Francisco to parents with careers as stage actors, Lee returned with them to their native Hong Kong and became a child star in the local film industry at age 6. Banished to America by his father after he was kicked out of secondary school for flagrant hooliganism, Lee waited tables in a Chinese restaurant, taught freelance dance classes, founded a kung fu club, attended the University of Washington and ended up in Los Angeles juggling his prowess in the fighting world with a serendipitous acting break that won him the role of Kato in the "Green Hornet" television show. Fascinating narrative threads proliferate. Lee was a Champion dancer in 1950s Hong Kong at the time of the Lindy hop and the cha-cha. Barely more than one-half Chinese (he also had English and Dutch Jewish forebears), he suffered from reverse racism that puts one in mind of Bob Marley's similar tribulations as a half-English youth in Jamaica. The membership of Lee's American fight club also broke all manner of traditional cultural and racial barriers. While upholding and developing a kung fu style that was (unusually) credited as the invention of a female fighter, Lee incorporated tactical elements from Okinawan, Korean and Japanese traditions - and even from his study of fencing - into the discipline he evolved. And his favorite song, which he repeatedly asked a co-star to play on the set of "The Way of the Dragon," was "Guantanamera." While the book makes clear that Lee took his marriage vows less than seriously, he remained devoted to his supremely grounded American wife, Linda. And he by all accounts had a ferocious sense of humor. One anecdote he told about life as an Asian-American: "One day, 1 was mowing my lawn when an American walked by and asked me how much 1 charged for the service. 1 said to him, '1 am doing this for free, but when I'm done cutting the grass, Em going to sleep with the woman inside the house.' " Lee died mysteriously but, Polly convincingly concludes, from mundane and unscandalous causes, in a girlfriend's apartment on the eve of the release of "Enter the Dragon," the Hollywood feature that would make him a legend and would have been his entree to spectacular global stardom. A different kind of prophetic pathos accrued to the HBO series "The Wire" after Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore in 2015, which led to civil unrest that drew the attention of the entire nation to the manifest injustices of life in that city's most blighted neighborhoods. The show, which never became a big hit in real time during its run from 2002 to 2008, has since become recognized as something of a gold standard for gritty, hyperreal storytelling on the small screen. The journalist Jonathan Abrams's ALL THE PIECES MATTER: The Inside Story of The Wire (Crown Archetype, $27) is an obvious labor of love - a comprehensive oral history of the show, stitched together from oodles of interviews with everyone involved in its creation. Conceived by the investigative reporter David Simon and the former police detective Ed Burns, "The Wire" explored the deep, racially charged dysfunction of Baltimore's institutions - the police force, the seaport economy, the public school system, the city government and the local media - in some 60 episodes that attracted the first-class writing talents of Richard Price, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, and launched or turbocharged the careers of brilliant actors from Domenie West and Idris Elba to Wendell Pierce and Michael B. Jordan. The book captures all of these voices and many more in a pointed and granular revisiting of the debates they engaged in as the series evolved and took on many edgy themes and subplots. At one point, we learn, a robber fleeing the local police stumbled onto the show's West Baltimore set and, seeing so many people uniformed in blue, threw himself down in surrender - only to learn later that he might easily have barreled on through the set and eluded his pursuers. So does life imitate art. Yet another brand of precocity marked the pathbreaking work of Ernst Lubitsch, a director whom the silent-film star Mary Pickford imported to Hollywood from Berlin when he was just 20 years old. He didn't end up doing much for her career, but - in the estimation of the film historian Joseph McBride, whose tome how did lubitsch do it? (Columbia University, $40) makes a comprehensive and enthusiastic (if overstated) case for his importance - "Lubitsch virtually created the romantic comedy genre," "countering American puritanical hypocrisy with European sophistication." In films like 1940's "The Shop Around the Corner" (remade as "You've Got Mail" in 1998 by Nora Ephron) and 1943's "Heaven Can Wait" (remade in 1978 by Warren Beatty), Lubitsch, according to McBride, "with all his tolerance for what is usually considered human misconduct or aberration," explored "how men should treat women and how women should treat men." The title of McBride's book ("a critical study, not a biography," as he notes) is adapted from a question that the director Billy Wilder posted on the wall of his office - "How would Lubitsch do it?" Wilder and other filmmakers including Peter Bogdanovich revered Lubitsch as the progenitor of the kind of smart, soignee entertainments that they aspired to bring to the big screen. In a supremely ironic twist, McBride and Bogdanovich appear as supporting actors in the long-awaited Orson Welles valedictory feature "The Other Side of the Wind." That film, delayed for decades, is at the center of a dispute this year between the Cannes festival, which disqualified for competition any work produced for streaming services, and Netflix, which sponsored the Welles film and protested the Cannes decision through a festival boycott. We can only hope that when the film is finally seen, it lives up to "the Lubitsch touch" of complex human comedy and high spirits. The most rewarding volume of this season's crop of books about the moving image may be space odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (Simon & Schuster, $30), the filmmaker and writer Michael Benson's engrossing, immersive examination of the long path to Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke's masterpiece of science fiction cinema, "2001: A Space Odyssey." The pair's fraught but hugely fruitful relationship forms the backdrop of this astonishing tale of obsessive genius at work. Kubrick, a jazz drummer in high school, hung out occasionally with Artie Shaw; when Kubrick mentioned that he was looking for a science fiction writer, it was Shaw who pointed him toward Arthur C. Clarke and his classic novella "Childhood's End." In the course of Benson's narrative, Clarke - a closeted gay man trying to keep his complicated menage of variously involved men and women financially afloat in Sri Lanka - becomes increasingly dependent on Kubrick to pull "2001" together for release (for Clarke can't deliver his novel and hit payday until the story is conclusively worked out). Kubrick, just as desperately, repeatedly fends off both Clarke and a growing host of studio executives who are equally antsy to see their multimillion-dollar investment somehow materialize under the guidance of their eccentric, secretive auteur. We learn early on that some of the very first footage shot consisted of the hallucinatory "Star Gate" sequences that come at the climax of the film, in which the astronaut Dave Bowman approaches the Jupiterian moon of Charon in his landing pod. These - being created well before any computer-generated imagery techniques existed - involved experimenting for long hours with high-intensity lights and fast film speeds over huge tanks of noxious, noisome chemicals in "an abandoned brassiere factory on 72nd Street and Broadway" that Kubrick rented for the undertaking. The elaborate sets for the space station scenes, constructed at studios outside London, involved a whole other saga of trial and error and ingenious invention. "'2001' never had a definitive script," Benson reports. "Major plot points remained in flux well into filming." The details of the climactic confrontation between Bowman and the murderously insubordinate HAL-9000 computer aboard the space station were improvised on the fly over the course of a few days. The film was received by critics as an unmitigated disaster. "Its first screenings were a harrowing ordeal, with audience reactions at the New York premiere including boos, catcalls and large-scale walkouts," Benson writes. "Most of the city's leading critics dismissed the film, some in personal and humiliating terms." Clarke, stunned, slunk out at the premiere's intermission. " Later, he recalled overhearing another comment emanating from the seated phalanx of MGM executives: 'Well, that's the end of Stanley Kubrick.'" The redoubtable New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael dumped on it as "monumentally unimaginative ... trash masquerading as art." Kubrick reportedly spent a sleepless night ruminating endlessly about where it had all gone wrong, and eventually trimmed 19 minutes before the film opened wide. But then something uncanny happened: Young people flocked to theaters across the country and embraced it wholeheartedly, and it became a box-office triumph. The film opened the same week that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and it was no doubt still on screens across America when Bobby Kennedy was murdered two months later. In the midst of national chaos and mayhem, "2001" felt like a stiff shot of cold truth. "Put simply," Benson writes, "it changed how we think about ourselves." When the prehistoric killer ape flings his bone club in the air and it morphs into a space station to the serene, reassuring strains of "The Blue Danube Waltz," 1 can tell you that one little boy's mind was utterly and thoroughly blown in the darkness of a small-town movie theater. But just try explaining to your kids that this kind of emotional experience is simply not accessible via an iPhone screen. All that is solid melts into air. BEN DICKINSON is a freelance writer and a former books and film editor at Elle magazine.
Library Journal Review
American Idiot coauthor Peisner's new book is an in-depth, well-researched look into the success and aftermath of the 1990s TV show In Living Color. Created and produced by Keenen Ivory Wayans, it was a groundbreaking sketch comedy show with an African American perspective that launched many careers such as those of the Wayans family members, Jim Carrey, and Jennifer Lopez. At the time Fox was a struggling fourth-place television network and Color's success helped launch the new network. This book begins with an examination into Wayans's background and then delves into the show's various seasons in historical context. Most of the sketches, such as "Homey the Clown," "Fire Marshal Bill, "Ugly Wanda," and "Star Trek: The Wrath of Farrakhan" are discussed in depth. It's a fascinating glimpse into the intense work needed to create and keep a show running, and how the production's popularity impacted the culture at that time and still reverberates today. VERDICT Highly recommended for those who enjoy reading about the entertainment industry, how their favorite TV shows are created, In Living Color, the Wayans family, Jim Carrey, and African Americans in the entertainment industry.-Sally Bryant, Pepperdine Univ. Lib., Malibu, CA © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Homey Don't Play That! Preface Keenen Ivory Wayans stood up, kissed his mom on the cheek, high-fived his younger brother Shawn, and hugged his dad. Smiling broadly, dressed in a sharp, black tuxedo, he paused for a split second, as if to take in the moment, just for himself. It would've been hard to script a triumph any more complete than the one he was in the middle of. He'd just heard his old friend Jerry Seinfeld say it, "And the winner of this year's Emmy is . . . In Living Color." The show had been on the air barely five months. And it was on Fox, which was barely considered a television network, programming only four nights a week. Fox had hemmed and hawed for the better part of a year deciding whether to air the show. They worried it was too black, that white people wouldn't get it, that black people would be offended, that gay people would protest, that Keenen's siblings weren't as funny as he thought they were, or simply that nobody would watch. Keenen had resisted their attempts to bend the show to their ideas, to water it down. He'd come too far. If he was going down, he was going down swinging on his own terms. Keenen took one step toward the stage inside the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and wrapped the show's line producer, Michael Petok, in a bear hug. Petok's fiancée wiped lipstick from Keenen's face and then Keenen embraced the show's other producer, Tamara Rawitt, a short, Jewish former marketing exec who'd become his somewhat unlikely lieutenant. As the three of them strode down the aisle toward the dais, they were trailed by Kevin Bright, a supervising producer on the show's pilot. All four walked onstage, Keenen nodded at Seinfeld, whom he'd known since the two were young standups at the Improv in New York, took the gold statue from the other presenter, Patrick Stewart, and looked out across the three thousand or so people staring back at him. At thirty-two, Keenen was hardly a fresh, young face anymore. He'd spent years slugging it out as a standup. He'd been turned down by Saturday Night Live. He'd played forgettable roles on forgotten television shows. For years, he'd watched the friends he'd come up with--Eddie Murphy, Arsenio Hall, Robert Townsend--achieve their dreams. He'd done okay too, but sometimes couldn't escape the feeling he was being left behind. Eddie was the biggest comedy star in the world. Robert and Keenen had worked together on a pretty great movie, Hollywood Shuffle, but afterward, Robert got all the shine. Arsenio debuted his hit late-night talk show more than a year before In Living Color launched. For a long time, even Keenen's younger brother Damon's star seemed to be eclipsing his. But this was, finally and undeniably, Keenen's moment. His show was a hit. He just won an Emmy. And to make it a little sweeter, the nominees he beat out included both Saturday Night Live and his old friend and rival Arsenio. "All right," he said, looking down at the floor, clearing his throat and exhaling in a short, shallow breath. "I'd like to thank the people who helped make the vision become a reality." He rolled through the expected list of thank-yous--his producers, his writers, Fox bigwigs like Barry Diller and Peter Chernin, his manager Eric Gold. "I could tell he was beginning to forget people," says Rawitt, recalling the moment. "You could see my mouth moving behind him, like 'Thank this one,' 'Thank that one.' I remember before the ceremony Eric Gold frantically rushing over to me and going, 'Please make him thank me.' " Keenen had grown up one of ten kids in the projects in Manhattan, and as he turned his speech toward his family, emotion overwhelmed him. "Above all, I'd like to thank my family. Those are the ones I've been doing this for all my life." He covered his mouth, stepped back a half step from the microphone, and quietly told himself, "Okay, let me chill." Keenen had never won anything in his life. In Living Color had been nominated in two other categories that year, Outstanding Choreography and Outstanding Writing, and lost both. He figured this would be the same but was prepared in case it wasn't. He'd planned a great speech to salute his mom, who'd been there to support him through all the things he'd never won, through his disappointments and failures. Composing himself, Keenen tried to continue. "My mother and father are here tonight . . ." Again, he began to choke up, and, out in the crowd, his brother Shawn wiped tears from his own eyes. "I'm gonna get through this," Keenen pledged before abandoning his resolve. "This is for you, Ma, forget it," he said, his voice shooting up a few octaves and cracking. With that, he waved the Emmy, and walked offstage, his arm draped around Rawitt's shoulders. "It was the worst acceptance speech ever," Keenen says, looking back on it twenty-five years later. Yet the moment was an unqualified, wide-screen triumph for a show that punctuated the beginning of a new era. There had been black sketch shows before In Living Color, including the short-lived but influential Richard Pryor Show more than a decade earlier. That this was the first one that found an audience said as much about that audience as it did about the show. The culture was changing. For more than fifty years, black life on screens big and small had looked even more demeaning than it did in the real world. Stereotypes were indulged. The Civil Rights Movement came and went without too many substantive changes in front of or behind the camera. There had been important breakthroughs--Bill Cosby, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, Richard Pryor--but the march of progress was exceedingly, agonizingly slow. Until suddenly it wasn't. Not only were there Eddie and Arsenio and Robert and Keenen, but there were Spike Lee and Oprah Winfrey and Reggie and Warrington Hudlin. Soon there would be Chris Rock and John Singleton and Martin Lawrence and the Hughes Brothers and Chris Tucker and Dave Chappelle. The week before that Emmy broadcast, a new show featuring a former rapper named Will Smith had debuted. Many of the era's other rappers would soon become multi-hyphenate stars themselves: Ice Cube, LL Cool J, Ice-T, Queen Latifah, Tupac Shakur. In Living Color--a black show created by a black man that seemed to effortlessly cross over to a mainstream audience ready and waiting for it--was in many ways at the center of it all. As Keenen put it, "We became this bridge in America between white suburban kids and urban kids." Most great success stories are the sum of small failures overcome. When you zoom tightly in on that Emmy coup, cracks appear in the foundation that offer hints as to why In Living Color lasted only five seasons and why Keenen didn't even finish out the fourth: One of the original cast members had been fired a few weeks before the Emmys, nearly the entire writing staff had already turned over, and many of the Fox executives Keenen thanked in his acceptance speech had either left the company or were on their way out soon. Even one of the producers on the podium that night accepting the Emmy alongside Keenen hadn't seen him since he was dismissed after the pilot. This was the unforgiving cauldron in which In Living Color was forged. But for at least those few moments on the auditorium stage that night, things were about as perfect as they could be. "There was the feeling of newness and excitement and Here we are! We've arrived!" says David Alan Grier, one of four cast members that survived all five seasons on the show. "Two weeks later it was, 'Let's move on.' " In Living Color was nominated for fifteen more Emmys over its next four seasons. It would never win another one again. Excerpted from Homey Don't Play That! by David Peisner All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.Table of Contents
Preface | p. 1 |
1 "If You Ain't Helping Your Brother, Then I'm Beating Your Ass" | p. 5 |
2 "Keenen Was Always the Pioneer" | p. 21 |
3 "This Is the Place" | p. 29 |
4 "Richard Was a God, So We Were Just Lucky to Be in His Orbit" | p. 43 |
5 "There's a New Sheriff in Town" | p. 51 |
6 "This Is What They Think of Us" | p. 59 |
7 "I Was Young, Black, and Angry" | p. 67 |
8 "Anybody Who Was Anybody Went There" | p. 75 |
9 "We're the Black Pack, Homey" | p. 83 |
10 "You Can't Kill This Movie" | p. 93 |
11 "The Bad Boys of Television" | p. 99 |
12 "The Running Joke Was If Your Last Name's Not Wayans, You Didn't Have a Shot" | p. 109 |
13 "Is This Okay to Say?" | p. 123 |
14 "If He Ain't Got No Jokes, I Don't Need Him" | p. 133 |
15 "It Was Just This Overnight Sensation" | p. 145 |
16 "Until It's Funny, I Can't Care" | p. 155 |
17 "What They Thought Was Hip-Hop, Wasn't Hip-Hop" | p. 167 |
18 "That's the Beauty of It: It's Dangerous and We Shouldn't Be Doing It" | p. 173 |
19 "We Got a Problem. I Want the Other Girl." | p. 189 |
20 "Some White Kid from Harvard Joking about Malcolm X-Lax-I Don't Think That Shit Is Funny" | p. 193 |
21 "If You Don't Bring Your A Game, Other People Are Happy to Do It" | p. 203 |
22 "All I Remember Is the Layer of Desperation That Hung in the Air" | p. 209 |
23 "Jamie Fucking Scared Me" | p. 221 |
24 "I'm Better Than Any of These Girls and You Know It!" | p. 227 |
25 "We Were Horrible to the Censors" | p. 237 |
26 "I Started Laughing So Hard That I Forgot to Do My Job" | p. 245 |
27 "This Show Isn't Just a Money Spigot" | p. 253 |
28 "It Just Seemed Like Nothing Was Ever Going to Be Funny Again" | p. 261 |
29 "It Was a Really Cold, Destructive Place to Work" | p. 269 |
30 "They Were Trying to Commandeer the Show" | p. 281 |
31 "It Was a Bunch of Scared People Left Trying to Save a Sinking Ship" | p. 291 |
32 "We Didn't Land on Chris Rock. Chris Rock Landed on Us." | p. 305 |
33 "We Were Getting a Sense It Just Wasn't Working" | p. 311 |
34 "It Was Time to Fold Up the Tent" | p. 325 |
35 "Does Anybody Say NBC Has All This White Programming?" | p. 331 |
36 "No Matter How Funny a Black Comic Is, It Doesn't Mean Shit Unless He Makes the Right White Man Laugh" | p. 339 |
37 "How Does In Living Color Fare in a World of Key and Peele?" | p. 347 |
38 "It's That Moment When It All Ignited" | p. 353 |
Acknowledgments | p. 359 |
Bibliography and Other Sources | p. 361 |
Author Interviews | p. 373 |
Index | p. 375 |